Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (21 page)

Perfection varies. One man's dream is another man's gangrenous knee. For some, perfection is a Riva Aquarama and Kristin Scott Thomas and getting ready to go to a party on a warm night with friends. For others, it's a damp hillside and a tent. There is, however, one constant. Everybody is in agreement that while the actors and the scenes and the plot may vary, the location is always the same. The location has to be Italy.

Nearly all my favourite places in the world are in Italy. Lake Como. Capri. Siena. And last week I found another.

It's a little restaurant called Volo in the southern city of Lecce, where you can sit outside in the evening, even in early November, and startle yourself with the swordfish carpaccio and the cheese and the local wine. The owner's almond cakes were the nicest thing I'd ever put in my mouth.

The couples that walked by were dazzlingly beautiful. It was impossibly perfect.

It's in a back street, far from the main squares, but even here the lighting is as carefully considered as if it had been designed for Pink Floyd. Where the narrow street went round a corner, someone had lit a candle. Why? Just to bring a bit of warmth and interest to a small place that would otherwise be lost to the night. That's the Italian way.

I think it's true to say that everyone I've ever met has at some point harboured a secret little dream that one day they will have a house in Umbria, where they will sit under the wisteria eating olives they have bought in the local market
that morning. It's one of the things that makes us British: wanting to be Italian. They're everything we're not. And they're everything we want to be. Stylish, unconcerned with petty rules, expressive and well-endowed.

Once, I said that to be born Italian and male was to win first prize in the lottery of life. Nobody argued. Nobody wrote to say: ‘No. I wish I were Swedish and gay.'

However, while Italy has many things that we can admire and envy and dream of, there is one big thing wrong with it. It has the worst soundtrack in the world. And I'm not talking about the barking dogs that wake you up every morning. Or the idiot with the strimmer in the next valley, or even the swarms of two-stroke motor scooters. No. I'm talking about the radio stations.

Just as it is everywhere else in the world these days, the dial is rammed full of choice. But actually there is no choice at all because, as with the menu in a TGI Friday's, you don't want any of it.

Music snobs have sneered for years about the awfulness of Europop – and with good reason. It's shocking. Things I'd rather listen to than a Belgian Eurovision wannabe include the sound of my own firing squad. Pop radio is just as bad in France and Spain and Germany – home of the Scorpions – but it reaches the fourteenth circle of hell when you arrive in Rome. I heard one tune on the car radio that was so bad, I felt compelled to find the man who'd written it and cut his head off. So imagine my surprise when the next thirty-six songs were even worse.

How can a country that has given the world so much art and literature and electricity possibly think it is acceptable to drive along listening to home-grown synthpop?

How can a country capable of making an engine sing like the best tenor of all time say that Gabriella Ferri sounds like
Janis Joplin? The only way you could have made Ms Joplin sound remotely similar would have been to plug her into the mains.

You think Italian television is bad, and you're right: it is very bad. But it is a haven of highbrow peace and summer's-afternoon tranquillity compared with the non-stop barrage of electronic trash that the radio pumps out. All of the shows are hosted by two people – usually a man and a woman – who argue furiously for a few minutes and then play a noise that sounds like a flock of tomcats being killed with a buzz saw.

And then, just when you think it can't get any worse, someone starts to sing. And the problem with that is: they are singing in Italian. And while Italian is good when you are making love or ordering lunch or even shouting at another motorist, it really doesn't work in a pop song.

‘Yes, sir, I can boogie' becomes ‘Si, signor, posso boogie'. Which doesn't sound quite right, somehow. And neither does ‘Bambina, puoi guidare la mia macchina', which is Italian for ‘Baby, you can drive my car'. Singing anything other than opera in Italian is like mixing cement in a tutu or swimming in a ballgown. Messy and wrong.

Plainly, Silvio Berlusconi knows this, which is why he has chosen to release a CD of love songs. I'm not making that up. He really has. Mr Bunga-Bunga used to be the singer on a cruise ship and … oh God, I've just thought of something. What if it was the one that employed John Prescott as a steward? It's hard to think of anything worse than being on a cruise ship, but being stuck out there with a million old people, and two million desperate divorcees, being served by Mr Bolshie and crooned at by Silvio? Honestly, I'd rather fire a nail gun into my testicles.

Anyway, Berlusconi fancies himself as a singer and lyricist,
and he has a mate who used to be a traffic warden who fancies himself as a guitarist, and the two of them have battled their way through Italy's increasingly difficult financial problems by staying up late into the night writing a selection of smoochy love songs.

I can give you a taste of the lyrics: ‘Listen to these songs. They are for you. Listen to them when you have a thirst for caresses; sing them when you are hungry for tenderness …' And now, if you don't mind, I'm going to be sick.

Sadly, the album's release date has been put back because of the eurozone problems, but we are assured it will be out in time for Christmas. It will be the ideal gift for someone you don't like very much.

6 November 2011

Over the years, I've done pretty well all the 100 things you're supposed to do before you die.

I've vomited in a fast jet, met Nelson Mandela.

Broken a bone, been arrested and driven a pick-up truck across the English Channel.

However, there is one piece of the jigsaw missing: I've never been on a nuclear-powered hunter-killer attack submarine.

Most people say that subs are their idea of hell.

Living in a narrow tube, hundreds of feet below the churning sea, pooing in plain view, sharing a bunk that's a bit too small with another man and knowing that your wife is at home porking the postman and that you won't have anything remotely interesting to do until your family and everyone you know has been turned into a whiff of irradiated dust.

Pah! If the balloon were to go up tomorrow, I'd break out my white polo neck and join the submarine service in a heartbeat. I know the Royal Navy once dismissed subs as ‘underhand and ungentlemanly' but that's precisely why I like them. You sneak up on an enemy, in big, atomic, softly-softly slippers, flick his ear and then run off and hide. He simply won't know you are there until he has exploded.

And have you ever seen a bad submarine film?
Crimson Tide
.
Morning Departure
.
Das Boot
. It is impossible to make an underwater movie dreary. Unless you are the Beatles, of course.

As a result of all this, I was very excited when I was invited
recently to spend some time aboard the brand-new HMS
Astute
. I knew that early in its life it had crashed into Scotland and then been hit by the tug that came to rescue it. Really it should have been called HMS
Vulnerable
. But I didn't care. I wanted to spend time on a vessel that is as long as a football pitch but which can barrel along, in reverential silence, at more than thirty knots.

Sadly, the trip was cancelled because of what the navy called a ‘technical problem'. This turned out, I think, to be a crew member who had run into the control room and opened fire with an SA80 assault rifle. Maybe a better name would have been HMS
Unlucky
.

No matter. I did not hesitate when another opportunity presented itself. This time, I would join
Astute
as it sailed past Key West in Florida to conduct a test-firing of its missiles. Can you honestly imagine anything you'd like to do more than that? Well, Anne Diamond probably could. And those people on
Loose Women
. But I couldn't and so I packed my little bag and last weekend headed over to Miami.

Unfortunately, by the time I arrived, HMS
Unreliable
had had another ‘technical problem'. It had flooded, apparently, and was limping north for repairs. So I spent the night in an airport hotel, watched
The Hunt for Red October
and, with a little tear in my eye, came home again.

It wasn't just the disappointment that made me sad, or the wasted trip to Florida.

No, I was looking forward to spending three days in an environment where smoking is banned and you can't just pop outside when you're desperate.

That trip around the Gulf of Mexico was going to be my cold turkey.

Yes, I admit that the multi-billion-pound HMS
Unlucky
is not the best place for a sixty-a-day man to kick the habit of
a lifetime. Not with that nuclear reactor humming away in its bowels and all those cruise missiles in its nose. Perhaps this is why other people choose less extreme methods to give up.

Hypnotism, for example. Well, I tried that and it didn't work because when the man with the half-hunter and the husky voice said, ‘Right, you're under now,' I put my hand up and said: ‘Er, actually I'm not.' This turned into a heated debate that ended when I tried to leave and he said he needed to bring me round first. I let him go through the motions, then I slipped away.

An alternative is nicotine patches. They work for many people – a point proved by the massive private jet owned by the man who invented them – but they make me itch. And gum is equally ineffective, because it makes you look slovenly and possibly American.

Willpower is obviously the best solution but I have the backbone of a worm and the resolve of a field mouse. The idea of striding purposefully past a newsagent with nothing but my head to stop me going inside and buying a glistening pack of Marlboro is as idiotic as setting a lamb chop in front of a Labrador and asking it not to eat.

However, the fact is that I can do without fags. At the moment, I'm spending about twenty hours a week in aeroplanes and at no point have I ever felt the need to attack the stewardess or murder the fat man in the seat next to me. When I can't smoke, I can cope.

Which is why I was so looking forward to breaking the habit on that sub. However, I do think there is another alternative.

Almost every week,
Country Life
is full of islands off the coast of Scotland that are for sale and it strikes me that these would make ideal getaway hostels for weak-willed, unhypnotizable people like me who want to give up smoking but can't.
There would be no handy branch of WH Smith. No nicotine at all between the shoreline and Glasgow. And the only visitors would come from out-of-control submarines that have crashed into the beach. And they wouldn't have any tabs either.

We could therefore head north and have our withdrawal tantrums away from our families and loved ones. Furniture could be provided for us to smash. And Wi-Fi so that we could do a bit of work.

I even believe the government should fund this idea. We are forever being told that smoking costs the country £5 billion a year: well, for half that ministers could turn Scotland from what it is now – a handy storage base for submarines – into a health farm.

13 November 2011

Put your hand on your heart and answer this question honestly. Do you have the faintest idea what's going on in the eurozone? We are told there's a terrible crisis that has mutated and gone airborne, but it's like the worst kind of bad dream, the sort where you can't actually see what's in the shadows. You're running and you're terrified and now you're on an escalator and, aaaargh, it's going the other way!

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, likened it last week to the Second World War but I think she's wrong. People knew at the time what caused that and they knew what had to be done to solve it.

The current problems facing Europe are more like the First World War.

There are many historians who have spent their lives trying to work out why millions of young men were forced to die in a bloody, muddy French trench, and the upshot is: no one has a clue. The Serbs wanted a port in Turkey. This enraged the Austrians. And they were enraged even more when a Serbian gang shot one of their royal family. They were so cross in fact that Germany decided to attack Russia.

Then, like your big mate in the playground, it declared war on France and, for no reason at all, thought Belgium ought to be roughed up as well. What the Belgians had to do with a dispute between Serbia and Austria, God only knows, but this was the trigger that brought Britain into the war. And for reasons that are as transparent as concrete, that brought Japan in as well.

Of course, they said it would all be over by Christmas. In the same way as they said the financial crisis was solved when the US insurance giant AIG was rescued. But it wasn't. Millions and millions of people were being killed and this caused the Americans to think: ‘You know what? We should send some of our young men over to Europe so they can be killed as well.'

People must have sat about back then thinking, ‘What the bloody hell is going on?' in much the way that people are sitting around now trying to get a handle on the eurozone crisis. It is unfathomable, a big potpourri of vested interests, national stereotypes, market reactions, furious students, gormless politicians, petrol bombs, trillion-euro debt and unbelievably complex economics. Trying to sort it out is like trying to untangle the headphone lead to your iPod while blindfold, wearing mittens and being attacked by a bear.

What they seem to be doing is throwing out the concept of democracy by replacing elected leaders with backroom technocrats. And hoping that this will appease the computer that controls the markets.

At times such as this the world should turn to the motor industry for help. In the First World War Henry Ford spent time and money trying to organize a peace conference, and few would disagree that the recent problems in Iraq could have been solved more cheaply and with much less death if every single person in the country had been given a Cadillac. This time round, though, it falls upon me to come up with a solution.

We watched last week a new Greek prime minister being sworn into office and, wow, what an office it was. There were elaborate rugs on the floor, ceilings high enough to stage an air display and furniture so expensive that Andrew Lloyd Webber could only dream about it.

This is a country that's preparing austerity measures that will make 1930s Germany look like Donald Trump's bathroom.

And yet it still owns works of art and buildings that are worth millions. Well, all of it has to go. All of it, d'you hear? Including the Parthenon. Sell it to Coca-Cola, McDonald's, anyone. Just sell it.

Europeans are going to have to get used to the idea that, actually, people in India and Brazil and China have got it right, while we are living a life we cannot afford.

This brings me on to the thrust of my brilliant plan. Benefits. At present you go to the doctor and tell him you have a bad back. He confirms this without looking up and as a result the government gives you a box of money every week that you use to sail across the Atlantic or start up a rock band.

Then you have the Jobseeker's Allowance. If you can show that you spend twelve seconds a week looking for work, you are paid to sit about all day, eating chips, drinking Ace and watching DVDs on the obligatory plasma television to which everyone feels entitled. One woman complained recently that the Jobseeker's Allowance was not big enough to pay for her son's funeral and he was lying on the mortuary slab as a result. Yes. Well, there you go, dear.

Obviously, all of this has to stop, and here's what I suggest. Instead of paying people benefits in cash, why not remove them from the decision-making process and instead give them what they need to live? They go round to the benefits office once a week and are given some bread, some meat, some toothpaste, a schooner of sherry and, at Christmas, one or two wooden toys for their children.

This system would reduce the amount of public drunkenness, because those on benefits would have no cash to spend on beer. It would reduce obesity, because they would be given only healthy food. And it would reduce debt, because
they would no longer be able to buy hideous settees using money they have no chance of paying back.

More importantly, it would teach us what the rest of the world already knows: that if you want to watch
The X Factor
from the comfort of a button-backed, reclining La-Z-Boy, you are going to have to work.

That would reduce unemployment, stimulate growth and show our friends in southern Europe that the solution to their woes is not replacing the government, or throwing petrol bombs at policemen, or getting the Germans to attack Russia. No. It shows them that if they want to be part of Europe, they need to get off their arses and get a job. Yours sincerely, Norman Tebbit.

20 November 2011